When the Iron Curtain Fell

I was born and grew up in the west in the cold war period. The threat of nuclear war from Russia was something that worked its way into stories, films and even discussion in our day to day lives. I was fairly young, so in all honesty I didn't feel any real fear of it becoming reality and it probably helped that TV viewing was generally curbed in our house. The biggest reality for me with regards the USSR was the fact that part of my grandmother's family lived behind the Berlin wall in East Germany, so I grew up knowing that there were places in the world where people couldn't easily leave their own country.

I didn't hear about it often, but little stories and events would happen which over time built up a picture. When I was young my great grandmother and great aunts came over from Germany to visit us. I didn't understand why at the time, but this was an incredibly special event. My great grandmother and one of the aunts lived in East Germany and I actually only recently learnt that they didn't have permission back then to travel to England. They'd gotten permission to visit West Germany and my other great aunt had snuck them out from there to visit the family they'd never been able to meet before.

In November 1989, when I was in my early teens, fantastic news was played all across the west that Germany was to be reunified and the Berlin wall was coming down. For all intents and purposes it was an amazing event which marked the end of the cold war and freedom for all those countries that had lived under Soviet rule since the end of the second world war. Pieces of the Berlin wall were being auctioned off for small fortunes as people vied for a piece of this history changing event.

Between 1988 and 1991 the Soviet Union was disbanded and many countries transitioned to independence. We all moved on with our lives and apart from reading or hearing about how terrible it was under Soviet rule, I heard little more about it for years, until I came to Australia and met a Ukrainian woman who lived through this event as an adult.

I'm not sure what prompted it, possibly a comment from a rather forward and naive Aussie woman, but the Ukrainian woman started to tell us about the realities of perestroika (restructuring) for many Ukrainians when it happened. Her English was good, but probably not fluent enough for intricacies, so what she managed to get across to us was that when perestroika happened, the new government needed money to pay for this new government, because Russia had left with everything. So they proceeded to take that money from the bank accounts of the people. This left many destitute and in some cases homeless. There were people who had just sold their home and before they could use that money to buy their new home, it was taken from them by their government. There were many people who went into the forests and shot themselves, so it seems suicide was rife.

I've been trying to find some confirmation of this, but my searches aren't really coming up with anything detailed, just overviews of the official history. I did find this small paragraph in a write up on the Soviet Union from 1953:

When the Russian Communists left, they took with them all the cash, the savings and retirement monies that were in the banks for the seniors. There is no investment capital, the economy is not working, and the people are slaves to poverty, but they had hope.

This certainly seems to confirm what this woman was telling us.

As I chatted with my sister about this revelation some time later, she told me about what her East German friend had told her about life in Berlin after the fall of the wall.

The reality of the people until this point was a poor, but community oriented lifestyle with guaranteed employment. When the wall fell, companies were privatised and many disappeared. What we in the west heard about was that West German companies were investing in the East. What they were actually doing was buying up factories and real estate, then asset stripping them and taking the money back to the west. Housing was refurbished and rebuilt, then the rents were brought in line with the west. The many unemployed Easterners sought jobs in western companies, but they were paid the equivalent of what they used to earn before the reunification, which was much less than their western counterparts were earning and it would struggle to cover the newly risen rental costs.

It was apparently not uncommon for people living in high rises to see bodies falling past their window as their buildings were utilised for suicide.

This woman's experience was of Berlin, which, despite being in the middle of East Germany, was also occupied by the west. In this article Sabine Rennefanz gives some insight into experiences in the rest of East Germany. It seems that to this day Germany is still not as united as we'd like to think, but hopefully discussion is now starting to happen so that the divide doesn't continue to deepen.

^source

Hearing experiences like these, directly from those who experienced them has made me start to realise exactly how much propaganda can extend into all our countries, not just those that are communist or under dictatorship. It also makes me realise that solutions on a large scale are never straight forward, someone will always lose out. Yet our history books don't really cover those aspects. Nothing is black and white, no matter how much we try to make it so.

Interestingly, that same Ukrainian woman who told me her experiences of perestroika offered some insights into the Ukraine situation when infighting first broke out in 2014, but that's another story, so I'll leave things there before I start rambling.